The Home Jar by Nancy Zafris Stories

One regrettable fact about “The Home Jar” is that the book’s first two stories are not among its best. They’re solid but not as engaging as others.
-Star Tribune

Synopsis

Nancy Zafris is a critically acclaimed writer because of the highly distinctive, piercing intelligence that underlies her works. Her gifts accumulate in a vision that somehow combines just the right amount of irony, subtle humor, and compassion for characters you won’t see anywhere else in contemporary fiction. Those characters are emotionally all over the map too: resolute, sympathetic, and indelible—their stories can be laugh-out-loud funny one minute and bittersweet the next. In The Home Jar, Zafris reconfirms herself to be among the keenest observers of the human condition around. This is her first short story collection since the critically acclaimed The People I Know, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and her most famous work, the New York Times notable novel The Metal Shredders. Zafris’s very loyal following of readers will herald The Home Jar as a major event in American letters.

Nancy Zafris is the author of two novels, Lucky Strike and The Metal Shredders, and a book of short stories, The People I Know. She is a winner of the Ohioana Library Association Award. She is currently the fiction editor at the Kenyon Review and editor for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series at the University of Georgia Press. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband and son.